The Hollywood Reporter
In the biggest surprise of the weekend, conservative provocateur Matt Walsh‘s Am I Racist? opened in fourth place with an estimated $4.8 million from 1,517 locations, the top debut of 2024 so far for a doc and the third biggest since Disney’s nature film Bears a decade ago. Am I Racist? is doing big business in conservative markets in the South, Midwest and Mountain States.
The Justin Folk-directed film, described as a “social experiment,” comes from Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing’s The Daily Wire and marks the company’s first theatrical launch for an in-house production with distribution handled by SDG Releasing.
In the film, which is drawing comparisons to Borat in terms of its tactics, Walsh tricks his subjects by assuming the role of a DEI trainee who attends anti-racism workshops, crashes private intellectual dinner parties and conducts sit-down interviews with experts and everyday Americans alike on the topic of racism. The film also discloses the fees paid to certain experts, including Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. In recent days, DiAngelo blasted Walsh and said she had donated her $15,000 fee to the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund.
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